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Friday, January 16, 2015

H1Z1 and how SOE lied to their customers

H1Z1, Sony Online Entertainment's latest game which offers a F2P zombie survival experience just went into Steam Early Access. While I have not played the game yet there are a few things to talk about the current state of the game.

I've heard about H1Z1 months ago and was somewhat interested in the game mostly because it supposedly offers a zombie survival experience like DayZ but in a more massive scale and best of all, it's Free to Play. H1Z1 entered Steam Early Access and of course people come and pay to try it out before the game went Free to Play later on. I am not going to talk about people paying to beta test a game, instead I'll be talking about how SOE lied to their consumers about H1Z1 not being Pay to Win.

SOE have been saying to a lot of people that they are not going to sell weapons, gears, and other stuff that would give the player an in-game advantage. They mentioned that they will only be selling cosmetic items. Well sadly...they lied. (You can read their promise of not P2W HERE)

After the game went into Early Access a lot of players found out that there is an airdrop feature where players can pay to have equipments dropped nearby. Consumers reacted in anger to the blatant lie and people have posted about it in various sites. SOE's response on the matter is basically them giving all the players the middle finger while saying tough luck if you don't like it. I find this kind of behaviour utterly disgusting and despicable as it is very clear that they are lying to the consumers.

There are of course people who defend SOE's decision by saying that this airdrop feature is not Pay to Win because other players can just take it. While other players might have a chance of getting those equipments
before the player who called the airdrop this is still a Pay to Win
feature as the player who calls in the airdrop will have an advantage of
knowing that an airdrop is coming and would be better prepared to get
the weapons.

After that we also have the usual "they gotta make money somehow" reasoning. Let me tell you something, they aren't going to make a lot of money by lying to the consumers either. If they are going to sell weapons, tell the consumers that they are going to sell weapons. Don't feed people bullshit about not Pay to Win, no weapon purchases and all that but do exactly the opposite at the last second.

Now that it has come to this, what can SOE do to fix this? A suggestion have been made to create servers where no airdrops are possible, but clearly everyone will then just go play on that server which would make the entire airdrop system unused and of course SOE won't have that.

As someone who (thankfully) haven't bought the game I can only wait and see what SOE will do about this. This behaviour does make me worry about another game from SOE that I am currently looking forward to, EverQuest Next.

A shame that this has to happen. I have always been someone who supports Free to Play game and try to talk to people that not all Free to Play games are Pay to Win. With the increase of F2P games that are not P2W I feel that people can now see that F2P games CAN be fair. But I guess SOE just have to come in and ruin everything. Thanks a lot SOE.